"Damon Knight - Anachron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

time."
He put the rheostat back to the beginning of that uninterrupted period.
He drew out a small crate and prized it open.
Chessmen, ivory with gold inlay, Florentine, fourteenth century.
Superb.
Another, from the opposite rack.
T'ang figurines, horses and men, ten to fourteen inches high.
Priceless.

The crates would not burn, Tomaso told him. He went down to the kitchen
to see, and it was true. The pieces lay in the roaring stove untouched. He
fished one out with a poker, even the feathery splinters of the unplaned wood
had not ignited.
It made a certain extraordinary kind of sense. When the moment came for
the crates to go back, any physical scrambling that had occurred in the
meantime would have no effect; they would simply put themselves together as
they had been before, like Thor's goats. But burning was another matter;
burning would have released energy which could not be replaced.
That settled one paradox, at any rate. There was another that nagged at
Peter's orderly mind. If the things he took out of that vault, seven
hundred-odd years in the future, were to become part of the collection
bequeathed by him to the museum, preserved by it, and eventually stored in the
vault for him to find -- then precisely where had they come from in the first
place?
It worried him. Peter had learned in life, as his brother had in
physics, that one never gets anything for nothing.
Moreover, this riddle was only one of his perplexities, and that not
among the greatest. For another example, there was the obstinate opacity of
the time-sphere whenever he attempted to examine the immediate future. However
often he tried it, the result was always the same: a cloudy blank, all the way
forward to the sudden unveiling of the marble gallery.
It was reasonable to expect the sphere to show nothing at times when he
himself was going to be in the vault, but this accounted for only five or six
hours out of every twenty-four. Again, presumably, it would show him no
changes to be made by himself, since foreknowledge would make it possible for
him to alter his actions. But he laboriously cleared one end of the vault, put
up a screen to hide the rest and made a vow -- which he kept -- not to alter
the clear space or move the screen for a week. Then he tried again -- with the
same result.
The only remaining explanation was that sometime during the next ten
years something was going to happen which he would prevent if he could; and
the clue to it was there, buried in that frustrating, unbroken blankness.
As a corollary, it was going to be something which he could prevent if
only he knew what it was ... or even when it was supposed to happen.
The event in question, in all probability, was his own death. Peter
therefore hired nine men to guard him, three to a shift -- because one man
alone could not be trusted, two might conspire against him, whereas three,
with the very minimum of effort, could be kept in a state of mutual suspicion.
He also underwent a thorough medical examination, had new locks installed on
every door and window, and took every other precaution ingenuity could